Wolf Haas - Brenner and God

“I’ll find those filthy-” he said, but his voice wobbled so much on “filthy” that he couldn’t get “pigs” out.

Natalie understood him regardless, though. She gave him a disapproving look just like she used to do, and shook her head in warning, as if to say: don’t make things any worse, Herr Simon.

This treatment was preferable to him just now, though, because he’d calmed himself down enough to ask in a normal voice, “Have the kidnappers made any demands yet?”

“Herr Simon,” Natalie said, and pressed her lips so thin that a kiss would have been perilous.

“In a situation like this a private investigator can find a child much quicker.”

“Herr Simon!”

“It’ll take the police three weeks just to find someone competent, by then he’ll be out sick, and after that they’ll say: ‘Now it’s too late, statute of limitations.’ ”

“Herr Simon, listen carefully to me. You’re not to undertake anything in this case.” She looked at him so seriously with her dark eyes that everything else receded from view. “We know that you used to be on the police force.”

Naturally she felt the need to emphasize this because until recently she was the only one who didn’t know. “But you’re not on the force anymore,” the psychologist said, professional brainwashing, as it were. “You have feelings of guilt, but you’re not allowed to solve this case with your own fists.”

“I’m not talking about fists,” he said, “but-”

“We’re not talking about absolutely anything, Herr Simon. Or else, the child might be brought into only greater danger. The police have already taken the matter in hand.”

“Have the kidnappers made contact at all?”

“The detectives will take care of it.”

“Strange. Kidnappers almost always demand no police. And these are demanding exactly the opposite: just police, no Brenner.”

“No Brenner,” Natalie said, earnestly and with that certain air of superiority that only people who know they’re doing the right thing get. But one thing to jot down for your own life. Certainty: always black ice. And Natalie didn’t realize the huge mistake she’d just made. Because that was the first time she didn’t call him “Herr Simon,” but rather “Brenner.”

And it struck Brenner that, in doing so, she was authorizing him to undertake the investigation. Unconsciously, as it were.

Thirty hours after the girl’s disappearance, Brenner was back at large. Outside it was raining, and later on he’d often think about how the moment he set foot on the street, what shot through his head were the words “Zone of Transparency.” Because let’s be honest with each other, a normal person wouldn’t think “Zone of Transparency” when he walked out of the police station and into the rain ten times and saw on his watch that the mishap occurred exactly thirty hours ago.

The rain, by and large, had never bothered Brenner much, and when the windshield wipers were doing their job well it was always calming, meditative for him. Helena was completely in love with the windshield wipers anyway, often he’d switch them on briefly even in the nicest weather just to delight her. But when you’re a chauffeur without a car who’s standing in the rain, then, subjectively speaking of course, that’s the moment when it hits you that you’re having a crisis. And the colossal duffel bag wasn’t exactly making things any easier.

You should know by now: crisis always equals opportunity! And before you start feeling sorry for Brenner-how he stood there in the rain without a car and without a job and without an apartment and without an umbrella and without a plan and with only this cheap duffel bag and this nuisance of a brainworm, “Zone of Transparency”-there’s one thing I need to tell you: if it hadn’t been raining, if Brenner weren’t so depressed walking in the rain, as if he’d never heard of a bus or a train or a taxi, he might never have noticed.

When a man follows you for a while in the rain, at some point you ask yourself, why is he doing that? Add to that, when the man, like Brenner, has no umbrella, but unlike Brenner, not a single hair. Total baldness might even be an advantage in the rain, because at least you don’t have wet hair afterward. But Brenner’s shadower was bald in such an old-fashioned way, with a wreath of hair around his head, i.e., the worst kind in the rain, because the raindrops hammer away at the unprotected bald part, and regardless, wet hair.

The aggravating presence of his shadower pulled Brenner out of his lethargy a little. To this day I don’t know what aggravated him more: that they still held him suspect and had him shadowed, or that baldy was such a dilettante about it.

And there you have it, once again, the best proof that there’s nothing in the world that doesn’t also have its good side. Because your average Viennese citizen might find it depressing that a new off-track betting parlor opens up every day, but purely for detective street practices, it’s convenient when you can wait in the entrance of the next betting parlor for your shadower.

“Next time, wear a sign that says ‘Shadowing’!” Brenner advised his trusty stalker, who nearly ran smack into him. “Then maybe you’d be less conspicuous.”

And not just his face, of course, but his whole bald head, too, turned red, only his lips were white as they said, “I need to speak with you.”

“There are easier ways to go about it.”

“I wanted to make sure that we weren’t being shadowed.”

And at that moment, as the man offered him his hand, it occurred to Brenner where he’d read the heading “Zone of Transparency.”

“Sebastian Knoll,” the man chipperly introduced himself.

I don’t know if it was because of the sleepless night in the holding cell at the police station, or simply the state of shock Brenner had been in for thirty hours now, that could explain why he suddenly had the feeling he’d better hold on tight to the door frame to keep himself from sinking into a fever dream.

In the green light of the betting parlor’s neon sign, he could see all too clearly the large raindrops crawling through Knoll’s wreath of hair. The purple spider veins on his earlobe, from an ancient piercing that had since closed up, looked to Brenner like a cryptic sign of either a cult or something extraterrestrial. Through the open door, racehorses and race dogs and race cars could be seen flickering across a TV screen. Outside, an unnaturally red streetcar sailed elegantly through the spray of rain, and above the door the ventilation system whooshed with the placing of bets, while just a few centimeters in front of Brenner, the dripping wet face of Knoll, the abortion fanatic, was claiming he must urgently speak with him.

Brenner wasn’t really listening to him, though, because the moment Knoll said his name it occurred to him that one of Knoll’s activists had shoved a brochure into his hand a few weeks ago in which he’d read the heading “Zone of Transparency.”

Pay attention: that’s what the glassy membrane of the ovum is called, into which the sperm implants itself-science, as it were. And believe it or not, for that first cell to divide: it takes thirty hours exactly. While the bald-headed man’s voice got increasingly impatient, from the betting commotion and the ventilation system drowning him out, Brenner couldn’t fight the thought that, exactly thirty hours after Helena’s disappearance, a chain reaction was now being set into motion. Just like the automatic sequence depicted so nicely in the brochure, how day after day the cells divide, and divide again, and divide again, without any human intervention. Suddenly he felt certain-or did it just seem that way to him in retrospect, what with the full knowledge one acquires in retrospect-that for anti-abortionist Knoll to turn up exactly thirty hours after the child’s disappearance was a sign that catastrophe would only multiply as automatically as cell division itself, just not in the direction of life. Rather, in the opposite direction.