Morgue Drawer Four (13 page)

“Could you check?” Martin asked. “Just give her a call.”

“She’s around here,” the guy replied, standing up to his full height. “Why, don’t you believe me?”

The menacing tone of the last question was not appealing to either of us, but Martin admittedly had the disadvantage of being vulnerable to attack if it came to that. He winced on the inside but then pulled himself together and stayed really casual on the outside. For Martin, I mean. Under his duffle coat you couldn’t discern much of his shivering, fortunately.

“I don’t have a hundred euros on me,” Martin said. “So it’d be easier for you just to call her. Then she can tell me if she wants to see me or not.”

“Phone calls are so impersonal,” the guy said.

The others were standing closer together, and an intangible but still-appreciable aggressiveness was in the air.

“Please give me the picture back,” Martin said. “I don’t think this is heading anywhere.”

“We’re not heading anywhere because you don’t want to come with us. We want to help you,” the spokesman murmured.

I almost puked. When guys like this say, “we want to help you, man” in a tone like that, then you should really get far, far away really, really fast. The help they mean is usually not of the type that one might wish for. Or do you think full blows to both sides of the head at the same time are very helpful? Occasionally their objective is only to “drive bad thoughts out of your mind,” but usually it drives only one thing—namely, a hole into your eardrum.

“Thank you, but I’d prefer not to burst in somewhere unannounced,” Martin said, taking two steps to the side and walking past the boys on his trembling legs. “You can keep the drawing, if you’d like.”

We kept walking, and I looked behind us again. The boys had crumpled the drawing up into a little ball and were swatting it back and forth to each other like a beanie bag. One of them was talking in a language I didn’t understand, and the rest of them gave loud and dirty laughs. In the end they didn’t seem to want to pick a fight beyond taking the picture. I was relieved and informed Martin of my observations. He was also slowly exhaling all the air he had taken from fear as the boys were cackling.

He found his tongue again amazingly fast, and then I quickly got what was coming to me.

“I feel really no particular inclination to serve as the strange object of amusement again for interviewees with testosterone swamping every sulcus of their brains.”

Which in simple words meant: He’s scared shitless of gorillas. And he’s right.

“I’m sure that sooner or later the detectives will figure out the name and address of the woman by their own means, and they can then conduct the further investigation,” he grumbled at no one in particular. His blind faith in the abilities of the criminal investigation unit did him credit of course, but they also showed how little a clue he actually had. Because the investigators are not the ones who control the discovery of information like that: folks on the street do. And as far as the willingness to cooperate goes on the part of boneheads like the aforesaid testosterone junkies, Martin was actually going to need someone to clue him in at some point. But right now didn’t seem like the best time.

“There is always somebody who comes forward with a helpful piece of information,” Martin said. He was starting to sound like a defiant little brat who starts every sentence with “but I want…”

“And when will that be happening?” I asked him. “Next millennium? When the little green men start landing here? By then the worms will have eaten their fill and be relaxing on my bones, burping, and there won’t be even one bastard around anymore who gives a rat’s ass that the bitch that your computer blurred up a pretty picture of may have been the reason that some small-time car thief got pushed off the bridge.”

I shouldn’t have said the word “bitch.” It just slipped out; in the lingo of my world it doesn’t imply anything negative, either. It just means “woman.” But Martin didn’t know that; he of course speaks only his silted academese, so now I had a real problem. I noticed it the millisecond I said it. Martin was closing the game down. And not just that, he turned around and started walking back to his car. Not a good idea.

“Martin, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that, I didn’t mean it that way; the people who I hang out with just say ‘bitch’ and don’t mean it in a bad way, but please don’t walk back past those big guys.”

It seemed like he didn’t hear me at all, but the big guys did seem to see him. One of them, anyways. He stood up and watched the little roly-poly man in the little wool coat approach his boys in their T-shirts.

“Martin, wake up and turn around!” I yelled. “Let’s talk about it again, I’ll apologize again, a hundred more times, no problem, but turn around now and get scarce before those bruisers up there decide your curiosity is pissing them off more than they let on before.”

He pretended not to hear me at all.

“Goddamnit, Martin, they’ll punch your nose in so flat you’ll only be able to breathe the thin air at two thousand meters.”

No response, even though I’d made an extra effort to imbue my warning with a scientific touch.

“Plus you’ll puke, piss blood, and you’ll spend your next twelve paychecks on the dentist.”

He hesitated, but now he’d come too close to them again. Meanwhile, four of the big boys had turned around and were watching him. Martin kept staring at the ground in front of him. I sensed that he was slowly panicking.

“Take off!” I yelled again. “Now!”

Martin bent over, reached into the dirt with his right hand, stood up again, mumbled a friendly “There’s my button!” toward the big boys, turned around, and started breathing again. Shallow and fast, but even so…air in, air out, that’s all you can do when you’re in utter panic to keep your lungs from sticking shut like a vacuum-sealed freezer bag.

With trembling knees, Martin walked the same path again that he had covered two minutes ago. This time it was a physical or psychological or whatever kind of wonder that he was able to move like this at all.

So right at the outset of our investigation we’d had bad luck. Unfriendly types like that, as Martin would presumably call those glistening assholes, were everywhere, but they’re not necessarily the biggest group, just the loudest. To get to the point, as the evening went on the level of aggression abated. But it didn’t get much easier for Martin because our next encounter was with a professional streetwalker.

“Good evening,” Martin said cheerfully.

I was already smiling before he said anything else.

“Hey, sweet ting, what I can do for you?” the woman asked, her face hardly visible in the darkness. At the time I thought not being able to see her was a small mercy, and I still do now. Her accent was so thick you had to think for a second to decide whether she was speaking German at all. Plus, she was reeling off the words like she’d learned them by heart. Which is probably true. How many sentences does a hooker actually need for her business model? Four? Five? I guess we were about to find out.

“I’m looking for a woman,” Martin said, and, as you probably expected, this phrasing of course gave rise to an eensy-weensie misunderstanding in this context.

“You fount woman, sweet ting,” the woman cooed.

This unexpected answer threw Martin a little, so he did a double-take and took a closer look at the woman than he had at first. His slightly disbelieving eyes wandered down, scrutinizing her clothes with increasing bewilderment. “Clothes” is of course a bit overstated. Here in winter she was wearing a slightly threadbare, faux-fur spaghetti-strap crop-top that gave the impression she was suckling a mangy animal, paired with some kind of overstretched wrist-warmer she wore where an upstanding lady would have worn a skirt. The most generously sized attire she had on was her boots, which came up over her knees. But the thin leather cracking off in several spots undoubtedly didn’t have that high of a thermal rating, either.

“Say, aren’t you cold?” Martin asked abruptly.

“You want warm me up?” she cooed.

“Um…” Martin said, cutting himself short. Obviously he didn’t want to warm her up, but he didn’t want to be impolite and just say no, either. It’s hard out here for a gentleman!

He pulled out another copy of the drawing from his pocket and held it out for the lady to see.

“I’m looking for this woman.”

“I can for you be any woman of worlt. Girlfrient, teacher, mama, whatever you wanting.”

Either this lady had frequent interactions in her line of work with men for whom she was supposed to play a certain role, or her German was much better than I had expected.

“No, you’ve misunderstood,” Martin explained, undaunted. “I’m looking for
this
woman. Do you know her?”

She blinked at the drawing, reached for it, and held it about two centimeters from her pupils. Blind as a bat. That might be an advantage in her line of work, I thought to myself. In the end not every trick who’s into whores with black boots are as nice as Richard Gere.

“No,” she said, returning the paper. “You come with me.”

“I’m looking only for this woman; it’s very important,” Martin said, looking as sad as a dog into whose bowl you’ve sliced a piece of tofu sausage.

“Sorry,” the woman said, and it sounded like she meant it. “Goot luck.” And with that the matter was closed.

Martin stuck the drawing back into his pocket, thanked her again politely, and walked on.

“How can she stand the cold like that, half-naked?” he asked me.

On that point of course he was asking the wrong guy, because I’ve never understood women’s response to temperature. The second you’re nice and warm under the covers, they slide their ice-cold feet over onto your calves, and presumably after holding an ice cube for the five hours before bedtime they lay their hands on your stomach. But if you then even remotely flinch, they start griping that men just cannot cuddle. Newsflash: men can cuddle. They even want to. Just not with ice cubes.

On the other hand, women will walk around in the depths of winter with bare midriffs and short skirts and ridiculous contrivances they call “shoes” when there are ice and snow on the street, and they fight tooth and nail against socks, warm jackets, or—God forbid—stocking caps. It doesn’t make any difference to me if women want to freeze themselves to death, but in the end they always come down with a bladder infection, and then you’re stuck another week without sex. A basic grasp of preventive medicine is such an easy thing to pick up, and you don’t even have to go to school to learn it, but somehow girls just do not get how it all works.

Martin and I each dwelled briefly on our thoughts, and then we looked for other victims to interrogate. We found them at news kiosks, game halls—although Martin displayed a certain Pavlovian timidity entering gambling establishments for the ordinary man—at street food stands, restaurants, pubs, bars, and the bouncer in front of a nightclub. The conversations were all more or less the same, apart from one that stood out from the rest.

It was with the aforesaid nightclub bouncer who Martin showed the drawing to. There were clear traces of advancing fatigue in Martin’s face.

“I’m not a credit-rating agency, Buddy,” said the Black Giant, whose smooth-shaven skull was a sparkly slime-green because it was reflecting the light from the club’s neon sign.

When men taller than 190 or shorter than 170 centimeters call you “Buddy,” incidentally, there is call for increased caution, which is why all of my warning lights immediately started flashing.

“I really hate to bother you with a favor, but I’ve got to know what her name is and where she lives,” Martin said. You could hear clear exhaustion and a certain resignation that had set in his voice. The only way I’d been able to convince him to keep going at all was with maximum effort and urgency. So this guy here was going to be our last witness.

“What are you looking for her for, Buddy?” the Black Giant asked.

Over the course of the evening I’d determined that my position as disinterested observer entailed unexpected advantages. Up to this point my immateriality was an “extreme burden” on me, as a shrink would presumably say. But my unobservability had also had its advantages during the countless conversations Martin had had all night. I was free to pay much closer attention to what people were saying between the lines. Usually there wasn’t much there, other than angling how to trade a piece of information for money.

But as Martin was rattling off his story about the girl from the grocery store checkout line, my warning bells suddenly went off. The bouncer wasn’t making a particularly affable impression, but he wasn’t really acting like a thug, either. Still, his vibe had something menacing about it, and I had the impression the guy knew more than what he was telling us.

“Martin,” I called. “This guy knows something.”

Martin responded promptly.

“Are you sure you haven’t seen this woman even once?” he asked politely. “It’s really incredibly important to me.”

“When I say no, that applies to the first, second, and third time you ask the same question,” the bouncer said. He was parleying as though he’d been a humanities major. And maybe he was. There are barkeeps with PhDs and taxi drivers with tenure at the university, after all!

“She may not speak German,” Martin said, as though he hadn’t heard the objection.

The Black Giant didn’t say anything.

“I’m sure that you know more than you want to tell me,” Martin said, politely.

“And I’m sure that you’d better get scarce,” the bouncer replied, sounding not at all amicable.

“All right, we’re done for tonight,” I said.

“Well, thank you very much for your time,” Martin said, turning around. He stuck the drawing, which the bouncer had taken a curious look at but not touched, back into his duffle coat pocket as he snuck down the dark alley toward the car.

“No matter what he knows, he’d never have said anything in a hundred years,” I said, trying to console him. The way Martin had to be trotting along here at one thirty in the morning, you really had to feel sorry for him.