Brenner and God (11 page)

“One million?” the hard-of-hearing pensioner barked.

“Go ahead and count it,” Knoll answered at a normal indoor volume, but Brenner understood him anyway because when someone says what you’re expecting him to say, then you understand him easier, even from a distance.

“What did you say?” the retiree asked, because he couldn’t understand Knoll even at close range. Possible that this rule about easier comprehension of what’s expected only applies to “from a distance” and not to “hard of hearing while at close range.”

“Go ahead and count it,” Knoll said as softly as he had
before because that was his volume, he didn’t let the rules of the game get dictated by someone else, no, always nudging the others a little to where he wanted them.

The stooge said nothing because—silent stooge.

“One thousand, two thousand, three thousand,” the Schrebergartener began, and Brenner thought to himself,
if he’s going to count to a million, I’m going back to sleep
.

“Seventy-two thousand,” the Schrebergarten boss said, and then stopped. “And where are the six hundred and seventy-two euros?”

Knoll either said nothing or said “Kiss my ass” so quietly that neither Brenner nor the pensioner heard it.

“I still do business in schillings, I don’t do euros,” the old man bellowed. “And one million is still seventy-two thousand six hundred and seventy-two euros and not seventy-two thousand euros flat.”

“As long as you’re not front-ending me in old francs,” Knoll said, dry as dust, and in the tension of the moment Brenner had to be careful not to let out a laugh.

“Exact calculation, my friend,” the old dogmatist wheezed.

“If you were being so exact about everything,” Knoll said, and a few other words, too, that Brenner couldn’t make out, but Knoll’s bad mood he understood nevertheless.

“If I were going to be exact, it would come to seventy-two thousand six hundred and seventy-four euros and forty cents. Actually, forty-two cents, but the two you can have, and the forty I’ll give you, too. But six hundred seventy-two euros, that’s still nine thousand schillings, roughly calculated. To be exact …”

What was happening now Brenner couldn’t see from
where he was, but I’ll put it this way: it took exactly as long as you’d need to pull an antediluvian pocket calculator out of your blue work pants and to type in 672 × 13.76.

“… it comes to nine thousand two hundred and forty-six schillings, and those I can’t just let you have.”

Brenner understood Knoll excellently now because he was speaking loudly and clearly—and had suddenly switched to, let’s say, a more informal mode of address.

“Either you sign now or you find yourself another chump who’ll buy this barracks off you for five times its value. Do you think I came all this way with a notary so that I could haggle over eighty-three cents?”

“What’s ‘five times the value’ supposed to mean?” the Schrebergartener protested. “Supply and demand!”

Shameless people always believe that all people are as dumb as they themselves are shameless. And maybe the shamelessness of the hard-of-hearing house-seller infected Brenner a little, too, because by now he’d ventured far enough out to the tiny staircase that he could see the three heads below through the brittle railing above. Interesting, though. Knoll: bald. The notary: thinning mousy hair. And the pensioner, of all people: full head of white hair. And the notary was even fairly young. But mouse hair already! And the skin on Knoll’s crown was peeling a little. Brenner thought to himself,
amazing that he doesn’t take better care of himself in the sun
, and he thought about maybe bringing it up with him if a good opportunity arose.

The white-haired pensioner was finally signing now. Because it might have become clear to him that he shouldn’t wear out his patience with Knoll and the notary, and so
before the buyer could change his mind, he’d put his three X’s down on the contract and left with the envelope of money.

It must have been an interesting sight that morning for the nosy neighbor of Knoll’s new premises. Forty-nine hours after the disappearance of Helena Kressdorf. First the pensioner limps out the door with a thick envelope and doesn’t even close the garden gate behind him. And shortly thereafter a taxi pulls up—because the outermost row of the Schrebergarten lets directly out onto the access road—and the notary with the briefcase climbs into the taxi, and right after the notary, Knoll comes out and gets in his Volvo, and half a minute later Brenner leaves the house. Caravan: understatement.

And if the neighbor had looked very closely, she might have even noticed that Brenner was following Knoll in his purple Mondeo—car chase, if you will. But she couldn’t possibly have guessed everything that Brenner had yet to face that day. Even with the most ironclad resolve, Brenner himself couldn’t have guessed. And to be perfectly honest: if he had guessed, he wouldn’t have driven one centimeter after Knoll. Because Brenner would have preferred to stay in the Schrebergarten cottage, prayed a few Our Fathers, and searched for a rope to hang himself with in peace.

Mankind could not have invented anything better than driving a car. Especially when you have someone you can follow. Because then it’s not so boring. The constant looking in the rearview mirror just made Brenner realize how often he would check to see if Helena was okay when he was driving, if she needed something, if she was sleeping, if she was smiling, if she was sitting comfortably, if she wanted a sip of something, if her teddy bear had fallen over, if she’d care to discuss something, or if she’d like to have her peace and quiet.

And every time now, no Helena in the rearview mirror. It pained Brenner so much that he even let out a cry. Because that’s one of the many advantages of a car. You can listen to music in private, you can enjoy nature without exertion, and when in despair, you can let out a cry.

For the sake of the car chase, of course, it was good that Brenner’s rearview glancing should plummet so dismally into emptiness. Because, he was all the more sensitive to what he saw behind that emptiness. Never before had a detective tailed a suspect as attentively as Brenner did Knoll—from the rearview mirror. Because he always left enough distance, and where Helena’s face would’ve been in the rearview mirror, Knoll’s black Volvo was gliding along in
the back window, but very tiny. The best music Brenner had heard in years was on the radio, the sun was laughing, traffic was rolling smoothly along, and it annoyed him at first when the programming got interrupted. But then, of course, believe it or not, the dead-serious news announcer reported that the case of Helena Kressdorf’s kidnapping had taken a dramatic turn due to a bloody incident with the ransom handover.

And you see, that’s the downside of driving. Because you think you’re the only one experiencing something, you think the world stands still while you’re in motion. But in reality, you’re the one sitting with one foot on the gas pedal and the other on the clutch until the radio tells you that the outside world just turned in a bloody direction.

So what happened while Brenner and Knoll were rolling merrily down the autobahn like two innocent children on the Lilliput train pretending to be cops and robbers?

Listen carefully. You need to take note of the following: the difficult thing about a kidnapping is always the ransom handover. If that weren’t true, everybody would be kidnapping everybody else. It would be paradise on earth! Imagine, no one would have to work anymore; instead everyone would make a living purely by kidnapping. You wouldn’t have to do anything to the kidnapped victim—treat them well even, better meals than at home, warm room, color TV, everything, and as soon as I have ten million in my account, he’s free to go home. It wouldn’t have to be a major drama. On the contrary, maybe he’d even go home with some spiritual gains.

Unfortunately, the handover, though. That’s where things went awry. The worm is simply always inside somewhere.
And so there you have it. Train, highway overpass, remote-controlled things, and, and, and. Always the unlikely endings, alas, where the kidnapper hunts a police squad through the city for days, from phone booth to phone booth, from message to message, pointless merry-go-round. That never pays off! I say, when you’re the kidnapper, and you steal time from the police for days, then you can’t be surprised. Because that young cop’s got a girlfriend, he’d also like to go home and watch TV, another one’s got a second job as a security guard, he loses the extra pay, or the single mother has to skip out on her appointment with the child psychiatrist all because of your ransom money handover. Naturally these public servants are going to become aggressive.

Prime example, the husband of the nanny who Brenner always dropped Helena off with and picked her up from. He came up with the idea of making his wife’s nursery school the ideal place for the handover. Because the middle of a group of children, of course, not so easy for a sharpshooter. Flip-side of the coin: he’s all the more nervous. And you see, that was the moment when Brenner lost radio reception. You should know, they were just racing past Salzburg, i.e., the German border—you barely notice it these days. So they’re already over the border, more or less, and in the middle of the report about the kidnapping, the signal switches over to Bavaria 3. While Brenner’s frantically dialing around on an unfamiliar radio, he loses Knoll from the rearview mirror.

To this day I’d be interested to know whether he lost Knoll merely because of that—because Knoll heard the report, too, and slowed down to search for better reception.

Now for some brief, general considerations until they
get the station back. The proof that you actually have the kidnapped victim is child’s play today compared to how it used to be, i.e., forensic evidence. It used to be that a finger would have to get hacked off, an ear, a toe, it was a dreadful burden for victim and perpetrator alike, because you don’t just go cutting off someone’s finger no matter how desperately you need the money. And today a hair suffices, a fingernail, and it makes it that much easier for all involved.

Easier and more difficult! Because nothing in the world’s got only advantages! And the great weakness of forensic evidence is the sidecar driver. Because DNA’s a real man-about-town. And one thing you can’t forget. A finger, an ear, that’s a one-of-a-kind matter. But a few hairs you can easily pluck off a piece of clothing or a comb, even if you don’t have the kidnapped child at all. Especially if you’re the husband of the nanny. And when on the same day that his unemployment benefits got cut, he read in the paper that the kidnappers hadn’t made contact, he simply plucked a hair off the sweater Helena had forgotten there.

Brenner was just hearing all of this now that he was finally able to tune the station back in. He nearly bit the steering wheel when he learned that Helena still hadn’t been found fifty-two hours after her disappearance, but that the nanny’s affable husband was dead on account of a nervous sharpshooter. Imagine, just a few days earlier Brenner had stood out in front of the building with him while he had a cigarette—because in the apartment, of course, strictly no smoking, don’t even ask.

But I have to say, for a lowly sidecar driver it wasn’t the stupidest idea. Listen up: the children his wife looked after
were supposed to take a field trip on International Savings Day, and the money was to be placed in one of their little backpacks, i.e., swap-on-the-way, tiny backpack full of cash for Helena. That was his objective, ostensibly, when in reality he’d quietly taken the money out of the backpack for himself back at home before the group embarked. They caught him in spite of this, of course, and no way would he have been able to run because, old saying:
well intentioned is the opposite of well kidnapped
.

Or better put, of well blackmailed, because he didn’t kidnap anyone. But I say they didn’t have to go and shoot him, although I can understand that the police were nervous with so many children playing. That many children would make anyone nervous—even without a kidnapping. Brenner felt somewhat complicit because he was the one who’d forgotten the sweater at the nanny’s a few weeks ago. Well, not really forgotten, more like intentionally left behind, because he’d never liked the sweater. But maybe he was just using his guilt to whitewash his despair over the fact that Helena was still missing.

The announcer reported further information and an interview with the head of the police operation, and Brenner got incredibly annoyed when just ten kilometers past Walserberg, he lost the Austrian station for good. Suddenly, Knoll passed him out of nowhere, and the Mondeo nearly started bucking on the autobahn just to catch up even halfway to the black Volvo. He wondered whether Knoll had heard the radio broadcast, too, and he wondered where Knoll was headed, why he was driving in the direction of Innsbruck, and he hoped that any additional radio reports would come
on only after they were out of the German triangle again, and he prayed he wouldn’t lose the Volvo.

Knoll exited the autobahn at Wörgel, and you could learn a lot about the human brain if you were to analyze Brenner’s breakdown here. I think he just didn’t want it to be true that Knoll was headed to where he was headed. But his behavior was becoming rather textbook now, and textbook: always a bad sign. He said to himself,
Bundesstrasse, better if I stay behind him because it’s better not to follow from ahead in the mountains
. He thought about these kinds of things, you see. Then he dialed around the radio again to see if there was another announcement somewhere. He had to have said to himself,
I’m not interested anymore, it was just a sidecar driver, it does zero for Helena, I’m casting it aside
. But that’s how people are. Always backward. Then he thought of her forgotten green sweater again with the green duck embroidered on it—terrible! And it seemed to him that Helena hadn’t liked the duck, either. All of this, just so that he wouldn’t have to face facts.

When Knoll turned off just five kilometers before Kitzbühel, things got stressful for Brenner. And I don’t mean the stress of being stuck behind a truck at a red light while the Volvo pulls ahead. I don’t mean the life-endangering stress of overtaking the truck and racing ahead, either. Because he had the Volvo right back in his sights. But then Knoll turned again. Brenner didn’t like that at all. When Knoll drove up the private street that Brenner knew so well.