Come, Sweet Death Page 9

  “And how do you know about that again?”

  “Why do you think the detectives were here today?”

  “Maybe they like you?”

  “Did I hear a maybe?”

  “And you weren’t surprised at all?”

  “That the police like me?”

  “That Lanz killed Bimbo.”

  “Truthfully, no. Not with what Lanz owed Bimbo from gambling.”

  “Sounds like you know all about that, too.”

  She kept her head perfectly still and shot him a punishing look for a few seconds. Which gave Brenner a chance to notice her faint Hansi-Munz mustache. Believe it or not, though, it somehow made her all the prettier.

  “Everybody knows about the gambling debts you guys have racked up. The Pro Meddlers are no better, though. You wouldn’t believe how much they play for at the Golden Heart.”

  “You frequent the Golden Heart?” Brenner asked.

  “I used to.”

  “How come only used to?”

  “Back before Stenzl became my boss. He owned the place. Or at least half of it.”

  “And who did the other half belong to?”

  “How should I know? His brother, I think. But then, when Stenzl became my boss six months ago, I would’ve felt weird going there after work, too. Especially since he and his brother were on the outs.”

  “Did you tell the police that part, too?”

  “You think I’m going to escort those carbon copy cops to the Golden Heart?”

  Brenner wondered if that was an invitation. But caution made him say something else: “Carbon copy cops! That’s a good one. And yet, you can still tell right away who’s the boss.”

  “Obviously. The one who smells like sweat.”

  Women and their sense of smell, Brenner thought, but he left it at that. He still had that invitation to get back to: “But now you can go to the Golden Heart again?”

  “As a matter of fact, I could go right now.”

  “How about tonight at ten?”

  “But you’ll be the first of your kind to risk going there. Into enemy territory.”

  “But, with you, I won’t be afraid.”

  “Papperlapapp!”

  “So, ten o’clock?”

  “On one condition: you hand over the pills you’ve got back at home.”

  Brenner felt a little dumb now on account of how Nicole had seen right through him with her X-ray eyes.

  “I know the kind of rabble I’m dealing with,” she said with a smile.

  And it was this smile that kept Brenner preoccupied until ten o’clock, much more so than the question of who killed Bimbo and Stenzl.

  The next day, though, Brenner didn’t know if his headache was from not taking the pills or just because he’d been boozing it up at the Golden Heart until four o’clock in the morning with Nicole.

  Or if it was from processing the fact that the bartender at the Golden Heart was, of all people, Angelika Lanz.

  CHAPTER 8

  His head felt as if a throbbing new shoot had sprouted from it overnight. It was only when he saw his bloodshot eye in the mirror that it started to come back to him. A fragmentary recap as he touched the fragmented skin on his cheek.

  Although, Brenner had always had red, pockmarked skin. And centimeter-deep vertical ruts in his cheeks, as if he was hiding a pair of razor blades in them. Today, though, the whole left half of his face was peeling off like a poorly shellacked mannequin. And his left ear, completely deaf.

  Of course, you could also say that the ass-kicking he got at four o’clock in the morning didn’t necessarily have to be the reason for his migraine. A migraine-brain like Brenner’s is just unpredictable. Sometimes you get an attack for no reason at all. And other times you get a kick to the head, and you feel marvelous, like an old TV that just needs a good old smack now and then.

  But Brenner’s head was hurting way too much to be matching up cause and effect now. He was standing in front of the mirror and thinking: Unbelievable that Nicole could drop him like a block of cement.

  But as he washed the blood off his face and watched it run down the drain, a few more details came back to him. And as he toweled off, he realized that it hadn’t been Nicole who’d knocked him around with a cement club.

  And as he got dressed, he remembered precisely how, at four in the morning, he and Nicole left the Golden Heart. And how they didn’t get very far. Not because that’s how drunk they were. But because two men got out of a truck and told Nicole to scram.

  Now he remembered all over again how the one guy asked him if he was Brenner, and before he could even nod his head, the other guy was launching into him in a way that made Brenner’s whole body nod.

  As he looked at his mangled uniform, it came back to him how the two guys had mopped the pavement with him outside the Golden Heart. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone to the Pro Meddler’s bar in my uniform, Brenner reconsidered now. And immediately his head punished him. Because thinking, always bad for a headache.

  Not-thinking, though, even worse, because then, pure headache’s all you’ve got in your skull. So now Brenner thinks: I could call in sick. But then the next thought: calling in sick at the last second, not exactly highly regarded by his colleagues. Somebody would’ve said: We present you with the Collegiality Cup because we’re so grateful to you for calling in sick at the last minute.

  It’s not like at an office where the work’ll still be there waiting for you the next day: the accident victims, the heart attacks, they expect nothing less than same-day delivery—even the suicides get a little fidgety if you don’t cut them down right away. Don’t get sore at me, that’s how the EMTs talk amongst themselves. It’s not meant in bad taste, but more like a defensive mechanism.

  Brenner had two possibilities now. Either I call in sick. Or I don’t call in sick.

  And these days, when you’re in headache mode and you’re faced with two possibilities, it’s the pits. So Brenner decides to just stumble down to the courtyard so that at least the possibilities will ease up on him.

  Impossible he could’ve driven, though. Because he was half-blind from his migraine. Unless you count yourself among the foremost migraine experts, you can’t know all about that. There are people who think they’re having a migraine just because they get a sharp little twinge at their temples. But these are the same people who confuse a toenail-clipping with foot amputation.

  In the crew room, Brenner noticed that the new schedule had been posted. Needless to say now, hope. Maybe he had the day off today.

  On the contrary, though. He was on today, tomorrow, and the next three and a half weeks, according to fat Nuttinger’s new punishment plan. Twelve hours a day for three and a half weeks straight without a single day off.

  And when he saw that, and when he noticed his co-workers’ snide grins all around, it came back to him. All of it. It all came flooding back. And you see, a person could certainly come up with some theories, i.e. migraine psychology. That maybe the Brenner-brain had only hatched a migraine so that he wouldn’t have to remember.

  But one look at the monthly schedule and the snide grins all around and the whole migraine was of no use—he would have to remember it now after all. How in his stupor last night, he got his ass kicked so bad, it’d left him lying on the sidewalk. And how someone must’ve called for an ambulance.

  Because why else would a Pro Med vehicle have been seen just minutes later driving into the Rapid Response yard for the first time since the Battle of Solferino? Where, startled, all the volunteers went streaming out into the courtyard at four in the morning. Because, just then, the triumphant Pro Meddlers were unloading the dazed Rapid Responder in his shredded uniform.

  It was all coming back to Brenner now. And for the first time in his life he was glad for the migraines, because they did in fact drape a certain veil over life.

  When you’re in this condition, nothing else matters to you. You don’t care if the person next to you is whistling, or if the gu
y across from you is talking in that grating tone of his, or if somebody in that guy’s vicinity is breathing, or if somebody’s jangling their eyelashes so much that it nearly ruptures your eardrum. You don’t even care if you’ve brought disgrace on yourself, or if you’ve been scheduled, punitively speaking, to three and a half weeks straight of work.

  Two minutes later, Brenner was already hotfooting it to the vehicle. A heart attack. Lights and sirens. Brenner was barely out of hearing range of the station before he turned the sirens off. But his two heads, both, got such a thrill out of the wheeeeoooo-wheeeeoooo that they picked up where the sirens had left off and just kept blaring it out at him.

  His one and only stroke of luck was that his partner today was the quiet 8K. Because, besieged by the chatter of a Czerny or a Hansi Munz, he definitely wouldn’t have survived the day.

  And the patient they’d landed in the ninth district didn’t do any talking on the drive either. He had a lovely antiques store on Porzellangasse. Today, though, he was the one showing signs of aging. Because, middle of broad daylight in his own antiques store, he collapses.

  He was lying on the gray linoleum floor, white as chalk, and staring at Brenner, scared out of his wits—and silent. And unbelievable luck for Brenner: the young shopgirl didn’t utter a word, either, out of fright. She hung a note on the door anyhow, though: “TEMPORARILY CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS.”

  And you see, the second you’re not watching—employees already wasting paper! Because if she’d waited ten minutes, she could’ve just written: “CLOSED DUE TO DEATH OF OWNER.”

  Brenner and the quiet 8K tried to resuscitate him, but it was hopeless. Don’t go thinking that it was Brenner’s fault, now. A heart massage is strenuous goddamn work, even if you’re in good shape. You’ll have sweat streaming down you, boy, even if you’re at it for just a few minutes. But, today of all days, it actually did Brenner some good.

  Because you’ve got to kneel over the dying person with arms outstretched like so, and then the rhythmic movements. Somehow it almost gave Brenner a reciprocal massage today. The way the dying man’s chest pressed back so nice and rhythmically against Brenner’s arms, it practically rippled out, massage-like, to his petrified neck muscles. Well, don’t go thinking that his headache had gone away, but maybe some momentary alleviation. Maybe a little like those exercises of Nicole’s.

  The fact that the man then died was just so typical of how this whole day was going. Because it’s just as often that somebody doesn’t die on you. Far outnumbered by the rides where nothing dramatic happens. A broken leg to urgent care. A kid with scarlet fever to the isolation unit. Parkinson’s to physical therapy. A cancer patient to radiation.

  I don’t want to get carried away here—I don’t know if you know this or not, but when I get started on the topic of disease, I can actually feel my organs itching me. Brenner, though, during those weeks when he was on fat Nuttinger’s punishment plan of zero days off, needless to say, he had to see quite a bit.

  On Day Two he got paired up with the shop boss. Who had to jump in and cover for Lanz for the time being, even though he himself had more than enough to do back in the vehicle repair shop.

  “If I’m filling in the driver gap, we’re just going to end up with a vehicle gap,” he grumbled. “There’s just not enough of us to go around.” Because the 590 with the broken tailpipe—the one where the patient was almost asphyxiated a few weeks ago—still not repaired.

  The next day, Brenner’s blue eye gradually turned green, and he got paired up with Hansi Munz. When they got a call for a suicide, Hansi Munz cut down the hanged, and with the next of kin right there next to him, he says to Brenner: “Hemp allergy.”

  It seemed to Brenner that with each passing day Hansi Munz was getting more and more like Bimbo, as if in Hansi Munz, the spirit of Bimbo now—spirit donor, so to speak.

  The day after that, Brenner got paired up with an 8K, then two days with Czerny, then back with Hansi Munz again, and then, on the day where he noticed his green eye was now starting to turn yellow, he got paired up with Nechvatel who listened to nothing but Zillertaler-Schürzenjäger cassettes the whole time. Then, two days with an 8K, and by then, his days and his partners and his hematoma slowly began to blur together.

  And it’s a peculiar effect, true for most people, Brenner was no exception. You fear nothing more than your life consisting only of work, that all you’re doing is running like a hamster on its wheel. But then, when you truly are overworked, when there’s no chance of you getting off the wheel, something in the brain must change. It must be like with marathon runners, who produce a certain substance that makes running suddenly very easy for them.

  Somehow Brenner enjoyed it, how the work kept him from ever having to think anymore. Just like with marathon runners, too, or managers, let’s say, they enjoy not having to think as long as they keep producing this substance.

  Brenner drove and drove and drove. Two or three hundred kilometers every day in city traffic. And if on average a call takes seven or eight kilometers, then, that’s—wait—or let’s say, for simplicity’s sake, it takes ten kilometers. Then, that’s twenty to thirty calls a day! Twenty to thirty times a day of putting a sick person on a stretcher, encouraging him, distracting him from his suffering a little.

  Because, out of twenty or thirty runs, at most, every tenth one is an emergency. At most. That’s two or three times a day that you find yourself having to reason: If I go against orders and run the red light, maybe the injured person will survive, and then his three kids will still have a father, and they’ll be allowed to go to school and study and the boy will become a gym teacher and the girl a tax consultant, and the youngest, smart as a whip, she’ll graduate with honors, finish school in record time, and then, head physician down in Mexico.

  But only if I charge through the red. Only if I nearly graze a pedestrian. But if I sit and wait for that last bit of red to drain out of the light, then he could possibly bleed to death on me and then, needless to say, financial problems for the family. And then, you can nix college, of course. And while you’re at it, you can nix the head physician in Mexico, too, more like head waitress at La Cantina Mexicana.

  Decisions like these, though, rare. And otherwise, it’s a little caregiving, a little encouragement. And most of the time, not even that. Mostly just listening to old people. Or just acting like you’re listening to them. Because they’re not seeking consolation. They just want to recite their same damn story for the hundred-thousandth time.

  And when you look at it that way, being an EMT is an interesting profession. Because you learn something about people. You listen to the old folks’ stories, and they tell you every detail of their most personal ailment a hundred times. As though life devises a unique malady for each person. Because they don’t know what you, as an EMT, figured out after just a couple weeks on the job: that down to the last hair, it’s the same damn story.

  The patients’ stories, though, those are still bearable, compared to your co-workers’ stories. Because co-worker stories, always insufferable, i.e. mortgage contract, i.e. tutor for their dim kid, i.e. marital matters. Brenner couldn’t even begin to comprehend it—the stuff of marital intimacy getting dished out to you in minute detail. But every day it bothered him less. And by the eleventh or twelfth day, he didn’t really register it at all anymore. The marathon substance had a completely neutralizing effect on his co-workers’ stories.

  Too much substance can be dangerous, too, though. Because Brenner was starting to get a little childish when he began imitating the voices that came in over the radio all day long. Especially Hansi Munz’s quacker of a voice—with each passing day, Brenner was able to pull it off better. And there were moments where he whined along with the patients à la Hansi Munz. It crossed into the danger zone, though, when at the start of his third week, he nearly didn’t hear who beat him up out in front of the Golden Heart.

  “Last week I was on vacation,” Lil’ Berti told him.

 
For god’s sake. Must produce substance now. Always going on about their vacations, people. You can hardly hold it against Brenner.

  “You do know it’s stuck with me, the idea of the detective agency.”

  For Christ’s sake. Lil’ Berti, always going on about his detective agency. On the other hand, though, out of all of them, he truly was the nicest one. By now, Brenner was managing not to listen, thanks to the substance, and yet, in spite of it, he could converse a little with Lil’ Berti: “Were you on the beach when you started making plans for your detective agency?”

  “No, no, I didn’t leave town.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Travel doesn’t do much for me.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “These days even the garbage travels.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “In fact, I always say, it’s only the garbage that travels these days,” Berti laughed.

  “Only the garbage, that’s a good one.”

  “Not to mention with a job like ours. Where every day we’re driving three hundred kilometers.”

  That’s it, Berti, Brenner thought. And in his thoughts he was someplace else altogether, boarding his thought-jet, as it were. And while we’re on the topic, I’ve got to say: traveling these days, often viewed critically. Because mass tourism and all that, and people trotting all over the globe and becoming more and more narrow-minded in spite of it. The thought-jet deserves a critical look, too, though. Because while you’re thought-jetting off somewhere, maybe somebody back home’s trying to tell you how it came to pass that you got a crash course in the cement business, so to speak, three weeks ago.

  Interesting parallel, though! Just like when you travel-travel through different countries and notice how people just get more and more similar, the same thing happens along the flight path of a thought-jet, too, where even in the farthest-flung destinations, who do you run into? Nobody but old acquaintances and the folks from back home. You know how people often say the world’s a village? Well, the thought-world’s just a village, too.