Morgue Drawer Four (8 page)

Yikes, he got “wiped” from me—it actually didn’t belong in his vocabulary at all. Gregor pretended he hadn’t noticed anything. “Well then, maybe tomorrow…”

“Hold on!” I yelled, and Martin gasped in fright.

“What it is?” Gregor called, apparently highly alarmed by the frightened gasp. Presumably he suspected an accident or something.

“What about the SLR?” I asked.

“The SLR?” Martin echoed.

“What did you say?” Gregor asked.

“You wanted to ask him whether an SLR had been reported stolen,” I reminded Martin.

“Say, do you know if a Mercedes SLR was reported stolen last week?” Martin babbled obediently into his headset. He had apparently lost all will to argue with me.

“No idea,” Gregor answered. “Why are you interested in that?”

“Do me a favor and check, OK?” Martin asked in a voice underlain with deep exhaustion.

It was quiet on the line for a moment, and then Gregor asked Martin to wait for a second, and we could hear some mumbling in the background, and then he got back on the phone.

“No SLR has been reported stolen in Cologne. Not last week, not the week before, and not since. Tomorrow will you let me in on why you want to know that?”

“Yes, yes,” Martin answered, then mumbled another thank-you and hung up.

“You see?” I asked triumphantly. “People who have bodies in their trunks don’t report their cars ripped off.”

“Maybe the reason why no theft was reported was precisely because there was no theft,” Martin retorted.

“But…” I couldn’t fathom the new direction our conversation had suddenly taken.

“You told me about a theft and a body. Maybe one of the two is incorrect, maybe both are incorrect. In any case I still have no evidence to support your story.”

This whole discussion proved only one thing: that Martin was pretty clever.

We spent the rest of the ride in silence. Martin was driving like a robot, and as far as I could tell, he wasn’t thinking anything. His brain was switched off. By contrast, I was mad. I was making an effort to pump all of the energy from my frustration into the convolutions of Martin’s brain, but I couldn’t tell if he noticed. He was on autopilot; maybe he was in shock.

He parked his “car” along a quiet side street, shut it off, and dragged his feet along the sidewalk. The door to another parked car opened, Martin took a frightened leap to the side but then relaxed a bit again as he recognized the person getting out.

“Birgit! What are you doing here?”

She beamed at him; I could only gape. Her naturally blond hair fell long and smooth and shiny over the fur collar of an orange-colored winter jacket, which, unfortunately, concealed her upper torso under a bulky mass of down. Her legs were inside black pinstriped pants that ran down to black high heels. Unless her jacket was covering up some monstrous deformity, the woman had to be pretty hot. Not quite as hot as her colleague, Katrin, but still. How had Martin landed this knockout?

“I wanted to show you my new car,” she called in high spirits, hugging Martin briefly, and then hopping back across the sidewalk and opening her passenger side door for him. “Hop in.”

Martin sighed softly but sat down on the leather seat like a good boy.

“What did you do with your old Polo?” he asked.

Totally unreal: this question was so unbelievably wrong at this point in time. When someone shows off their new car for you, then you ask how many horse the thing has under its hood, if the suspension is lowered, how many watts the system serves up, and if the maximum speed shown on the speedometer is correct. You don’t ask what you did with your old car. And then just a Polo! Is there anything more trivial in life than the whereabouts of an old Polo?

“I sold it,” Birgit mumbled. “I’ve always wanted to have one of these.”

“Mmm hmm,” was all Martin could contribute. I suspect he still didn’t get what “one of these” actually meant. A BMW 3-Series convertible from the early 1980s, tiptop condition, grey exterior, red leather interior. Yeah, red! A totally awesome chick magnet. But Martin was sitting on the soft leather like a stuffed dummy, staring straight ahead, making an effort to smile and finally nodding.

“Nice,” he said.

“Martin!” I screamed. “The thing is not ‘nice,’ it’s kickass fresh.”

“Kickass fresh,” Martin repeated.

Birgit’s grin widened. “You think?”

That’s how you talk to chicks!

“Yes,” Martin said. He was acting like he’d downed a whole box of psychiatric meds.

“I’m glad,” Birgit cheered. “Should we go for a little spin?”

Martin shook his head. “Please don’t be mad, but I’m not doing that well today. I’ve got a headache.” Goodness gracious me, dear Martin was out of sorts!

“Another time, then,” Birgit said, softening her tone.

There was a short pause.

“Do you want to come up?” Martin asked.

I was amazed. That was even better, of course. Instead of adrenalin in the car, right to testosterone in the love nest. I was experiencing excited anticipation, but I kept my mouth shut.

“Sure.”

We got out of the car, climbed up to the third floor, and walked into Martin’s apartment. Birgit apparently knew her way around, and Martin disappeared into the kitchen.

“Would you like some tea?” he called.

“Please.”

What planet had I landed on? You drink tea when you’re sick. I mean, really sick. Really suffering. Puking and the runs and all that. And the first thing that you try is actually Coke, everyone knows that. But when the cholera or whatever causes such messy business has been sticking around for a while, then you switch to tea. In the face of death, and definitely not together with a chick on your couch before you get down to business. But, please, I was familiarizing myself with an entirely new world, here. A parallel universe. I was actually excited to see how things would proceed.

Martin steeped loose-leaf tea, which he had to fuss with to measure out and fill into an environmentally friendly reusable tea filter and then dispose of in the compostable-waste container. I wondered what humanity had actually invented the teabag for.

I left Martin back in the kitchen and made my way to Birgit in the living room. When I entered the room, I had a massive shock. Fine, I wasn’t really expecting Martin to hang his walls full of titty calendars, but what I found here totally shocked me. There were city maps hanging everywhere. Yeah, we encountered that already, do you remember? His colleague Jochen and the city map? So here’s where that thread finds its resolution: Martin collects city maps. Old ones and up-to-date ones. The old ones were hung behind glass on his walls. I know I personally have always wanted to see what the streets of Cologne’s medieval downtown used to be called, like, three hundred years ago. It’s totally amazingly interesting, don’t you think?

Birgit studied Cologne, Nürnberg, and Berlin—maybe she was learning a couple of street names by heart so that she could chat about them with Martin after he came back in. But maybe she was also wondering what was up with his oddball hobby, I couldn’t tell. I swirled around her the way those famous moths do to light, but I couldn’t establish any contact. Too bad. Really, really too bad.

Martin poured the tea in authentic style from a silver teapot into delicate little porcelain cups that were so thin you could almost see through them. The lady took milk. The Queen of England and her difficult family members would definitely have had fun with this game. Fortunately there was no extending of pinkies, otherwise I’d have virtually puked, and I was afraid that would not have improved Martin’s state of mind. At the moment he wasn’t noticing me, and that was certainly a good thing.

“How are things going at the bank?” Martin asked after he had doped himself up with a couple sips of tea.

Bank! I wouldn’t have thought that of Birgit. Financial types are the absolute worst. Those arrogant pricks who jump into banking and finance programs right out of school all pretty much look like they take a swim every morning in a gigantic tub of lube. Even before starting their training at all! And after a couple of months in banking and finance their brains turn so mushy the only things they can still talk about are customers’ current-account portfolios, tax on the interest on income from wheel bolt sales, or line-of-credit-compliant correlation. Worst of all, of course, they think they’re the kings of the banking system, while in reality they’re commercial-paper tigers. They’re so dumb they put a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on top of their phones during their lunch breaks and wonder why the phone still rings.

“Oh, pretty well,” said Birgit, who was actually acting like a normal person and not like a malfunctioning computer. “We just wrapped up a giant piece of business with Saudi Arabia, which is why we’ve all been doing so much overtime lately.”

Deliriously interesting what all the nation’s intellectual elite spouts forth upon the chesterfield when getting together after work for a little cup of tea. No wonder the mood in Germany never really goes up. And surely with this kind of intellectual prattle as a mating dance our declining birthrate should be no surprise.

“So, anything exciting going on at work for you lately?” Birgit asked. And then presumably picturing what Martin does she started making a silly, nervous giggle.

I immediately found her much nicer—all the dead-serious conversation had been getting to me.

“I’m sorry; I’m still not used to your job.”

Ah ha, they hadn’t known each other that long. We were still in the warm-up phase of the relationship. I wanted to seize onto hope, but then I looked at Martin with his little porcelain teacup and his neatly parted hair sitting on the couch, the legs of his creased pants pulled up slightly so that the material around the knees wouldn’t be baggy—nope, this wasn’t going anywhere.

“Well, things are fairly routine at work,” Martin said tamely. “However, I think I’ll be standing in line for unemployment pretty soon if Dr. Eilig gets his bill through the Bundestag to ban autopsies.”

“Oh, him, ‘Dr. Christian,’” Birgit said, making a dismissive gesture with her hand. “That jack-in-the-pulpit is crazy,” she said. “If it were up to him, doctors wouldn’t be allowed to write any prescriptions for contraceptives anymore, and he wants to completely ban abortions as well, even when the life of the mother is at risk. He’s not getting that bill through. Especially because he lacks so much credibility what with all the Mustangs and Lamborghinis and other outrageous cars he drives.”

“I hope so,” Martin said, “because otherwise with this reversion to the Dark Ages we’ll be proof positive that Einstein was right after all about the relativity of time.”

Good grief, here are two people in love sitting on the couch and, instead of fooling around some, they’re driveling on about Einstein’s theory of relativity. “Relative” described only one thing going on here: the degree of insanity in this situation, and it was pretty high.

Birgit dismissed his pessimism with her hand.

“Do you guys actually get updates from the police on the progress of investigations in murder cases?” she asked.

Martin nodded. “Typically we work very closely with the detectives, and they let us know when there are suspects. Sometimes we have to do special investigations or provide assessments to find out whether a certain suspect might in fact be a perpetrator. That means running DNA analyses or things like that.”

Martin was a little distracted, but maybe Birgit wasn’t noticing that at all. I hadn’t checked yet how well the two of them really knew each other, and in the case of Birgit I obviously didn’t know what was going on inside her head, either. Maybe more physics of love than physics of time?

“Do you think your work is actually fun, or do you do it because someone has to do it?” she asked.

“Normally it’s fun for me,” Martin mumbled.

“Normally?”

Martin poured a warm-up into their teacups, drawing the ceremony out ridiculously long.

“I’ve just had a case where I don’t know exactly what I should do,” he finally said.

I pricked up my ears, so to speak.

“Do tell,” Birgit encouraged him enthusiastically, scooting a bit closer. Even without knowing her innermost thoughts, any blind person could see that she was totally into Martin. He presumably needed only flick his finger and she would pounce on him. But he didn’t flick, he sipped. Tea. Then things continued.

“There is a body that I examined briefly at the site where it was found and later autopsied,” Martin explained in his doctor’s voice. “There isn’t any real evidence of foul play, actually.”

“Actually…” Birgit said, helping him along. She was literally quivering with curiosity about an exciting story.

Personally I’d have done something different with a quivering babe on the couch than tell her about dead bodies—but to each his own.

“In retrospect I’ve got a strange feeling that something is not right about this death,” Martin mumbled.

He’d come up with a really nice way to word it so that he didn’t have to say that the restless soul of a dead man has been jabbering his ears off.

“What kind of feeling?” Birgit asked.