Brenner and God (20 page)

Brenner, of course, wasn’t waiting a moment’s thought on these things now. He wasn’t even aware at first that he was back up above. His senses hadn’t completely returned to him yet when the shot rang out. And one thing you can’t forget: a hunting rifle’s always a loud shot. But that’s not to say that Kressdorf was shooting into the air with his hunting rifle in order to return Brenner to his senses now—wake the dead, as it were. Quite the contrary. Kressdorf was helping his security boss—who didn’t want to resuscitate Brenner—to quit smoking once and for all, i.e., shot him right in the lungs. And then the foreman did it gladly, though it was no pretty task, because let’s put it this way: Brenner had more freckles on his face than the man who was respirating him. The foreman only did it because his boss was holding a shotgun to his head. But if you’re saying,
that’s despicable
, then I
unfortunately have to tell you, this was still the nice part of the story.

And if you scare easily, think about something else now. Close your eyes and think of that vacation on the beach, reclining chair, suntan lotion, sound of the waves. And not of that patch of grass beside the cesspit. Kressdorf wasn’t leaving anything half-done there. In other words, Brenner’s first breath was also his rescuer’s last. Because directly in the head. And believe it or not, Brenner almost envied him for it.

Normally you’d say that a person who’s just come to should rest a little while and not return right away to the mob office that he’s just taken a flying leap from until after a lunch break. But here again is the advantage of being the murderer. You don’t have to go around agonizing about the little moral prescriptions. And Kressdorf wasn’t going to begrudge Brenner the chance to catch his breath now. With shotgun in hand, he forced Brenner, who was still shaky and befuddled, to push the two corpses into the cesspit to join Knoll and Congressman Stachl. And you see, that’s the beautiful thing about misfortune. That is the magnificent thing about sickness and death. That’s the wonderful thing about exhaustion and collapse. You hopelessly outmatch every weapon. Because total exhaustion, terminal illness, complete despair, nothing’s more motivating than a shotgun. But Brenner was just too exhausted still. Even with the strongest of wills, he couldn’t do it. His knees kept buckling—marionettes haven’t got anything on him.

There was nothing left for Kressdorf to do now. Shotgun or no shotgun, he had to do it himself. In the workplace, he’d heave a loud sigh at every opportunity and bemoan tearfully
how he always had to do everything himself. But today, no whining, no sighing, and no stamping his feet. He was utterly focused on the matter at hand. I’d almost like to say it was one of the happiest moments in his life, when there was nothing except him and the task before him, and with a few determined kicks of his foot, he nudged the two corpses over the edge of the cesspit, where each disappeared with an indifferent splash.

My dear swan, Knoll, the congressman, and the two bully-boys in a cesspit. A party came together there, and you almost have to say, it’s no minor feat when a pool of shit is made qualitatively worse.

Standing had become so strenuous for Brenner that he sat back down in the grass, right at the edge of the cesspit. He stared into it and tried to remember something important that he’d experienced down there. He mustered all his powers of concentration, but he only knew that it was something terribly important. Something earth-shattering, it seemed to him, that explained why he was so exhausted. But it sank deeper and deeper, never to resurface in him.

Purely from a detective’s standpoint, it wasn’t so bad that he’d completely forgotten the good lord because the good lord wasn’t the perpetrator. The good lord didn’t make the South Tyrolean take Helena. He didn’t make Brenner forget to gas up the night before. He didn’t make the Frau Doctor implicate her husband in a gigantic construction contract by not reporting an abortion she’d performed on a twelve-year-old child. He didn’t make the congressman spoil Prater Park and get his contractor’s wife pregnant. And above all, he didn’t make Knoll make threats in his name.

The good lord just gazed upon all of this with a smile because—free will. The sight of the open pit, into which his memory had disappeared for all eternity, was so discomforting to Brenner that he asked Kressdorf whether he should cover the cesspit back up with the wooden boards or whether it wasn’t worth it because he was still planning to throw him in, too.

“Close it up,” Kressdorf said. “Why do you think I got you back out, Herr Simon?” Because—unbelievable, Kressdorf, still correct, addressing Brenner formally as Herr Simon. “You I still need. And those few boards can always be quickly removed again. But no innocent person should fall in.”

Then he sent Brenner to the shower and had him put on some of his clean hunting clothes. And then they drove to Vienna to get Helena.

One thing I’ve never liked about the human brain: that in the most dangerous situations, it often attaches importance to the silliest little things. So it bothers you that the executioner uses a bad aftershave, it bothers you that the doctor pronounces your throat cancer with a rolled R, and it bothers you that you can’t claim your wedding ring as a tax deduction. And believe it or not, it was bothering Brenner now that he should have to slip into a hunting ensemble while Kressdorf nagged him.

But I have to defend Kressdorf here. What was he supposed to do? There simply wasn’t any other clothing in the cabin. And was he supposed to let Brenner sit on his leather upholstery in his cesspit-soaked clothes? He didn’t have to rush him, either, though. As if it were all riding on these few seconds now. Brenner only had two buckhorn buttons fastened when Kressdorf got impatient and pushed him into the car.

So that Kressdorf wouldn’t notice how bad he was feeling, Brenner said in the car, “Today we’re really contributing something to the rejuvenation of society.” But Kressdorf didn’t react, just kept his sights trained on Brenner so he wouldn’t make a wrong turn on the way out of Kitzbühel. As if the joke-explaining soul of the newly deceased security
guard were inside him, Brenner went on, “Because swapping four imbeciles for one child, society can’t have anything against that.”

But Kressdorf told him he should keep his mouth shut and concentrate on the driving. Whether or not he meant to address Brenner formally as Herr Simon was left open-ended this time because short and succinct: “Shut up.”

As Brenner told him the story of the accidental kidnapping by the South Tyrolean, it seemed like he might actually be halfway reaching Kressdorf again, but no sooner had he begun to hope that his disclosure might turn Kressdorf around and pull him back over to his side, when Kressdorf interrupted him again with a perfectly devoid of emotion “Shut up.”

At least this gave Brenner plenty of time to think about what his best course of action was in order to keep Kressdorf from shooting him as soon as he got the kid. Or if he did shoot him, how he could prevent him from shooting the South Tyrolean, too. Because one thing’s clear: when you’ve come as far as Kressdorf has, you don’t waste any time coddling your witnesses, no, you mop them up like fly droppings because—no sentimentality.

But the longer he thought about it, the more hopeless the situation seemed to him. Between Amstetten and St. Pölten, he tried to ensnare Kressdorf in conversation again. “What was it about your wife that Knoll caught on tape and you killed him for?”

“Nothing at all.”

Interesting, though: because Brenner thought “Nothing at all” meant about as much as “Shut up,” he didn’t even
entertain the possibility that Kressdorf had just begun to tell him the truth. But maybe Brenner’s silence was good just now, because twenty kilometers outside St. Pölten, Kressdorf started talking again. “It wasn’t my wife who Knoll found something out about. It was me. You know how my office is in Munich.”

Kressdorf thought about this sentence for another five minutes, as if he’d discovered an explanation for all the world’s misfortunes in the words “Munich” and “office.”

“That’s why I’d sometimes use my wife’s office in Vienna and keep the bribe money in the clinic’s safe. Once, Congressman Stachl met me there to deliver a kickback. And Knoll got it on his surveillance camera.”

“How much was he demanding for it?” Brenner asked, because now that Kressdorf had gotten to talking, a question in between wasn’t a problem anymore.

“Nothing at all. Knoll was an idealist. His suggestion was: he erases the tape, and I get my wife to close the clinic once and for all. If he’d gone public with his evidence, not only would MegaLand have been history, Congressman Stachl and I would’ve gone to prison, KREBA would’ve gone bankrupt. And so on. I’m not just talking about a few million euros.”

That Kressdorf was telling him all this—ninety-nine hours after Helena’s kidnapping—was not a good sign for Brenner.

“You know what I think?” Kressdorf asked him. But then he just thought it over for a while and kept it to himself. Whether he just wasn’t certain, or he just didn’t want to divulge it to Brenner, I don’t know.

He said, “Knoll was always grinning with that air of superiority. Especially when I explained to him that I’d rather go to prison than cause my wife any harm. He just said, with that smug smile of his, that he didn’t understand where Helena—”

Kressdorf sank so low now, it was as if he’d never speak another word again. Brenner almost finished the sentence for him, just to get it out there. He almost said,
this kind of thing has happened to other men before, too
. Almost said,
the main thing is that nothing’s happened to Helena
. But Kressdorf didn’t give the impression of wanting to hear anything more, so Brenner didn’t say anything at all.

“What blood type are you, Herr Simon?”

“I don’t know. They measured it once when I was on the force.”

“Measured!” Kressdorf laughed. But it wasn’t a laugh that eased Brenner’s mind. Because it was the clipped, dry laugh of a ghost. “You mean tested.”

“I don’t remember, though.”

“Why didn’t you stay on the police force?”

Brenner didn’t reply, because on the cue of “police,” Kressdorf kept right on talking.

“I’ve done plenty of half-legal things in my life. Or illegal, as far as I’m concerned. Everybody knows that nothing happens in the construction business without bribes. And MegaLand is far and away the biggest contract KREBA’s ever gotten. But real crimes, kidnapping and blackmail, I’ve never had anything to do with them. Not to mention murder. Or manslaughter. And when I pressured my wife to perform the abortion on that underage girl of Reinhard’s, it
was already too much for me. Not because of the abortion, but because of her. I told her that, what with the bank loan, Reinhard had Knoll right in the palm of his hand. That’s why she did it. And to finally be left in peace by Knoll. But not even the bank director managed to subdue Knoll.”

“Or he didn’t want to,” Brenner said.

“Or he didn’t want to, exactly.”

“But, all the same, you got into the MegaLand business because you smoothed the way with the abortion.”

“That’s correct, Herr Simon.”

Brenner opted not to say anything more now, because he noticed that Kressdorf was in an overly sensitive mood where he was interpreting everything as a reproach.

“And then the congressman went into business with my wife.” Kressdorf laughed so bitterly at that, you would’ve thought it was a worse crime than the four people dead in the cesspit.

“Stachl and I met at a charity golf game. I’d been after him for years. Like every other contractor. Before, he’d always brushed me off like I was just some do-it-yourself builder and he was Donald Trump. But then all of the sudden he was sweet as pie. He whispers to me that Bank Director Reinhard has a problem that my wife can remedy. And in turn, Reinhard might have an opportunity to subdue Knoll.”

“And to let you build MegaLand.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not that easy to build in Prater Park. It started with the golf course, and then it grew from there. For a banker who was in the black, it was a matter close to his heart for half of the Prater to come under his control, and right in the middle of Vienna when the whole
city’s in the red. With Stachl he had the right man at his side. People’s protests did in fact hold us up, but we just about had them all cleared out of our way. Then suddenly Helena was kidnapped. We thought Knoll was behind it. And Knoll thought we were behind it. And now you’re telling me it wasn’t even an actual kidnapping. But in the meantime, four people are dead.”

“Six,” Brenner said, “if you count Milan and the nanny’s husband.”

“Stachl tried to keep me from pulling you back out. He said, ‘Too much has happened already.’ It didn’t matter to him one bit that Helena was his kid, too.”

“Maybe he didn’t know?”

Kressdorf had nothing to say to that. I almost think it didn’t matter to him either at this point.

When they arrived in front of the South Tyrolean’s house, across the street from the gas station, Brenner still didn’t know how he was supposed to keep the humiliated non-father from killing both him and the South Tyrolean in order to undo history and get his daughter back, not just Helena, but hair, skin, all of her—genetically speaking, as it were.

Now, for your reassurance. At least the South Tyrolean wasn’t there.

Now, for your disassurance. The child wasn’t there, either.

After they’d searched the last room, Brenner tried to convince Kressdorf that he hadn’t lied to him. He explained to him that the South Tyrolean had probably gone to the police after he didn’t come back as promised. Even Brenner didn’t really believe that, although it later turned out to be
true. But then Kressdorf did something that filled Brenner with such fright that being dangled from a balcony seemed like a MegaLand attraction by comparison.

You should know, Kressdorf’s angry outbursts had caused him so much damage both professionally and personally over the years that at some point, as a matter of principle, he’d taken to the age-old trick of silently counting down from ten in hairy situations. But Kressdorf was so far outside himself now that—one hundred hours after his daughter’s disappearance—he forgot about the “silently” part, and although he was indeed counting down, he was doing it out loud.